work streams

Data

Access to South African administrative micro-level tax data

The National Treasury (NT) and the Revenue Service in South Africa (SARS) are making high-level administrative tax data available for research purposes. The use of these data for research and policy formulation is a central part of the SA-TIED programme. South Africa is one of only five countries globally to grant access to this type of data for research purposes.

The possibility for anyone interested to make a research proposal to gain access to these data is a very advanced and transparent approach to managing a national revenue service’s administrative data.

Such an approach reveals the ongoing commitment of SA-TIED programme partners to the shared principle that good policy requires good research and good research requires good data.

Accessing SARS administrative data at the NT

Each of the SA-TIED work streams using these data will periodically call for research proposals during the duration of the programme (2018-2020). Answering one of these calls is the best way you can gain access to, training with, and use of the data for research purposes.

These are micro data, which means the units of a population are individuals or businesses. Data records are linked by using the variables they have in common. Personal information is removed so individuals and firms cannot be identified.

To ease the work of researchers, two panel datasets that link parts of these four datasets will be made available:

a panel dataset that contains linked data from the CIT, VAT, Customs and IRP5 sets (ready).

an employment panel data containing linked data from IRP5 and IT12 to allow researchers to track employment and earnings trends in South Africa (forthcoming).

Data security

The data is anonymized to comply with global best practices on data security and can only be accessed at a secured data facility located in Pretoria, South Africa, where three UNU-WIDER researchers work with NT and SARS staff to maintain the database and share knowledge and capabilities with anyone given access.

Research

If you are planning on responding to a SA-TIED call for research proposals, please check this portion of our site for completed, current, and ongoing research to avoid the duplication of existing research. Final papers resulting from the analysis of these data will be made available on our research page alongside all other SA-TIED final papers.